ControlReview

Released at a time when the movie world seems to have all but exhausted the narrative possibilities of the rock & roll biopic - so much so that they're scheduled for parody later this year with Walk Hard - Control is an overdue and necessary reminder that musicians do in fact have interesting, complex and yet not just cliche-laden lives. Director Anton Corbijn, a longtime familiar of performers in both audio and visual mediums, has effectively crafted one of the best films of its kind in years, elevating the story of Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis into a meditation on the emotional landscape of creative people which feels at once epic and intimate.

Newcomer Sam Riley plays Curtis, a talented but introverted student who slowly rises to fame after he forms Joy Division with Peter Hook (Joe Anderson) and Bernard Sumner (James Anthony Pearson). After a whirlwind romance, Ian marries Deborah (Samantha Morton), but he becomes overwhelmed when the band starts to gain recognition, and begins to indulge in the spoils of success - which includes the attention of an aspiring journalist named Annik (Alexandra Maria Lara). Simultaneously, he succumbs to the onset of epilepsy, which makes many of the band's concert appearances memorable for those who attend, but unfortunately requires him to take a barrage of pills. With his health in danger, his marital status indefinite and yet Joy Division's profile on the rise, Ian soon finds himself at a crossroads between the likelihood of professional success and the equally-imminent danger of personal failure.

Bereft of a long-deceased sibling, an unsupportive parent or any other lifelong ghost to haunt Curtis, Control has only the known details of his immediate life - from his days as a student to his debut as a rock & roller - to drive the film's biopic narrative. Thankfully, this means that precious few rise-only-to-fall conventions are employed in the service of telling his story, instead tracking the interior world of a young man who found his calling only to find it overwhelmed by physical pain and emotional insecurity. Mind you, since Curtis there have been countless lead-singer casualties driven to heights of eccentricity and reclusiveness by their talent, but director Corbijn never reduces the singer's problems to familiar dramatic punch lines like drug-induced freakouts or furniture-throwing tantrums.

Corbijn elects to shoot in stark black and white - a pretentious decision for sure - but his feature debut is confident and evocative: while early scenes of Curtis' wafting-smoke meditations and domestic-hell minutiae seem superfluous, Corbijn confidently allows the audience time to grow familiar with the character's behavior so that later scenes require less and less dialogue to clarify or even point towards his mental tumult. There's nothing here about a small-town boy's rise to fame, a la Walk the Line or Ray; rather, Control offers a deeply human portrait of a man who found his calling but was destroyed when his personal and professional worlds collided.

Additionally, Corbijn cast almost every role perfectly, starting with the soon-to-be-discovered Riley as Curtis. From his onstage behavior to his bubbling ocean of introspection, Riley has Curtis' idiosyncrasies down: regardless of directorial emphasis or even editing, he manages to highlight the many (and equally significant) ways in which Curtis found himself being pulled apart, never suggesting that it was solely romantic entanglements or drugs or the vagaries of fame that destroyed him, but rather some undetermined combination of the three that won't and shouldn't easily be ascribed to his obituary.

Meanwhile, Samantha Morton has made a career for years conveying effortless fragility, and continues that unabated streak of brilliant performances here as Deborah. She likely had the tougher role to play in the film, not the least of which because Curtis' real wife wrote the memoirs upon which Control is based, but she manages to show how Deborah slowly moves from the front of Curtis' worshipful throng to the back, and how it's not by argument or confrontation but quiet, melancholy alienation. And as Annik, Alexandra Maria Lara has but a few scenes to render a compelling foil for Deborah's housewife, but she does an excellent job differentiating the women without vilifying either her counterpart or herself.

For those who especially care, the concert material is all brilliantly handled as well, putting you more or less literally in the front row of each of Joy Division's shows. But the film isn't really about the band, or even about Curtis' proper career. Rather, it explores Curtis' creativity in a way that few films do - by showing the manifestation of a talent rather than its inspiration; there's something admirable about a music film that doesn't feel it necessary to locate an anecdote or episode that completely explains why this song was written at that particular time.

Simultaneously, the audience does immediately understand why it is that Joy Division's music was so vital, and why it continues to prove influential - so much so that this uninitiated viewer went out afterward and bought one of their CDs. But what's more valuable than a few more dollars in the band members' coffers is the appreciation and understanding of what they accomplished, because that lasts far longer than even the lifespan of a single song or album. Control is that rare greatest-hits package that makes you want to go back and explore a band's entire discography, and moreover, that razes the cliches and renders their history as new, fresh and interesting as when it originally happened.